Rep. Jake Auchincloss

I don't want a shutdown.

Shutdowns are bad for the American people.

They undermine the integrity of the federal government.

And I don't think it's Democrats who are shutting down the government.

Republicans have the White House, the Senate, the House.

They've claimed a mandate.

They've also declared that they, quote, hate Democrats.

And now they have found themselves, with their vaunted mandate, unable to keep the government open precisely because they won't talk to Democrats.

This is Congress 101.

You want a deal.

You negotiate.

But Donald Trump has spent more time and more willingness to negotiate with Hamas than he has with the Democratic Party.

That is a failure of his governance.

Before this shutdown, I put forward a series of proposals

That would be a starting point to get to yes.

Talked about reversing the worst of the Medicaid cuts, particularly through Medicaid 1115 waivers, which happy to talk more about.

Talking about funding cops grants so that local law enforcement have the tools they need to hire and train police officers.

Talked about a vote on the tariffs that have been the biggest tax hike in the history of the middle class.

Basic things, all of which have a super majority of support from Americans, none of which are esoteric partisan issues, right?

And they haven't so much as picked up the phone.

Love the question.

And in fact, I just wrote a sub stack on this question on my sub stack, simple but not easy, where I call for multi-year agency specific appropriations.

So David, if you'd be willing to let me like wonk out for one minute.

Yeah, please.

For our listeners.

The way it works now is

There are every year on September 30th, funding runs out and every single year Congress basically has to agree on every single element to the federal government, its budget.

And that's been the way basically for the last 40 years, 50 years, roughly since about the 1970s is the way we've done it since it started in the 1970s.

Only four times has Congress successfully funded the entire federal government on time.

Four times.

It's like 10% or fewer of the years and never in the 21st century.

So this system is broken.

The single year appropriations of across the board funding for the federal government is broken.

My approach

is simple and I think more tightly scoped, which is to say Congress should take its time on an agency by agency basis to do multi-year authorizations and appropriations.

So for example, the Federal Aviation Administration, those are air traffic controllers and airport inspections, we come together, the authorizing committee, which would be transportation infrastructure, they agree on new policy for the FAA, which by the way we did two years ago, it was a good bipartisan process.

Then based on that new authorization, you give them five years worth of funding and basically a ticket that says every year they go back to the treasury and they draw funding based on that five year authorization.

For maybe the Environmental Protection Agency, we do it for 10 years.

Maybe for the National Institutes of Health, which we want to really insulate from politics, we do it for 15 years.

Maybe for the Department of Defense, based on the Constitution's prohibition on a standing army, we do it every single year to keep it as close as possible to the will of the people.

But you stagger different agencies for different time lengths based on insulation from politics versus accountability to the public will.

And Congress is able to take its time on both the authorization, which is the policy,

and the appropriations, which is the money.

And that way we're not every single September in the situation where we've had nine months of posturing followed by six hours of behind the scenes deal making that doesn't produce a great product because it was thrown together at the last minute.

I want to put forward two points on the Epstein issue.

One is

The biggest scandal to me is not what might be in those Epstein files, right?

The biggest scandal to me is that even if the worst of the worst that we are imagining were to come out in the Epstein files, let's imagine, which is not a long stretch to imagine that Donald Trump was just smeared across the Epstein files in a series of very, very compromising positions.

The biggest scandal is that even if that were to become common knowledge, the Republican Party would still cover for him.

A bunch of Republican members of the Congress would walk down the hallways and mumble when reporters asked them questions, and they would say, oh, I didn't see that, or well, I guess that's not really an issue that the American people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

This guy could literally be

a fully compromised pedophile and the Republican Party would still back him.

That tells us all we need to know about how broken the Republican Party is behind Donald Trump and how broken this cult of personality has become for the American public.

Now, if ultimately, I mean, even Marjorie Taylor Greene said the other day,

I don't know Speaker Johnson's machinations.

My hunch is that it actually won't be Speaker Johnson who ends up running obstruction at the last moment for Donald Trump.

It'll actually be Pam Bondi.

As we saw with her recent testimony to Congress, she has fully vacated even the illusion of a Department of Justice that has a firewall with the White House and that is pursuing justice impartially.

It's a fully owned entity of Trump Incorporated.

And my hunch is she'll find some

semi-legal or illegal way of just ignoring the congressional dictum.

And I think what's imperative for Democrats is to not make this an isolated situation around the Epstein files.

I know those have the most salience.

I know those are the most salacious.

But to describe and to delineate

how this actually, this is just one dot of a constellation of corruption.

I mean, you've got the Secretary of Commerce flacking his own crypto enterprise in Pakistan and the Middle East.

You've got RFK Junior's top policy aides owning

companies on the side that are flacking bidets with tax preference dollars.

You've got Brad Smith, who ran CMS for the first 100 days, hooking up health insurance corporations with less regulation and more reimbursement, despite the fact that those health insurance corporations are investors in his company that he's currently running.

And don't even get me started on the Trump family itself, like the Trump coin and his sons.

This is threaded through.

This is marbled within the patrimony of Donald Trump.

And the Epstein files are one example of it.

It shouldn't be behind the scenes.

It needs to be fully out in the open.

And it's not a messaging problem.

It's an ideas problem.

I am fed up with Beltway strategists and consultants who sort of massage and message test and pressurize different talking points.

No, it's about framing it as the working class, blah, blah, blah.

And it's really condescending to the average American.

The average American is listening or reading four to six hours of content online every single day, video, audio, text.

They have the appetite to hear Democrats explain ideas in depth, new ideas that challenge the status quo and that explain why we are the party of improvement.

And we are the party for the middle class.

The middle class has not had a voice in the Trump administration.

The middle class doesn't have a super PAC.

It doesn't have a lobby.

But it should have the Democratic Party.

Alyssa Slotkin has been clear on this matter.

And I subscribe to her point of view.

And now we need to explain to the middle class why we are going to tackle and treat cost disease, which has afflicted housing and health care and utilities, which now consume more than half of a middle class family's take home pay.

We will treat cost disease to make life more affordable.

We will take on corruption on both sides.

I've talked about the corruption of MAGA, but there is corruption on both sides.

And we need to take it on through election reform that gets rid of partisan primaries and gerrymandering and Citizens United.

And we need to become the party trusted on education.

The school closures were a catastrophe.

We have not put forward a resonant and refreshing education agenda in the last five years.

And we need to talk about building 1,000 trade schools, about surging one-on-one high dosage tutoring to every student in America, and about banning smartphones across the classrooms of this country so that these kids can learn and thrive.

haven't been conceived there was an old maxim that democrats fall in love and republicans fall in line that's not true anymore what happened over the last decade is that republicans fell in love they created a cult of personality around this individual and democrats fell in line and they fell in line for some righteous reasons and i i think it actually is important to have discipline in the ranks in the house democratic caucus and senate democratic caucus because

We're in the minority and we have to hold the line.

I don't have a problem with discipline.

I do have a problem with an ideological straitjacket because that ideological straitjacket is asphyxiating new ideas and young talent.

And it's going to lock us into a permanent minority as a party, even putting aside the rigging and the gerrymandering that Republicans are contesting.

If we stay in this present course after the census in 2030, we will be locked out of a governing majority as a party.

We have to realign the electorate.

We have to define a new center based on the best ideas across different ideological factions in this country and be unapologetic about it.

That means specific ideas that actually explain to the American people not just who we are against but what we are for.

Good to be with you, David.